Traveling Man is a two-CD album of live recordings from a veteran of the blues scene, a man with a roadworn face and a gnarled voice which afford him a kind of crusty authenticity, even if he was born more than 70 years ago in upper-class Boston under the name William Homans III. He put that all behind him, however, to pursue a lively, varied career in a range of mostly blue-collar occupations.

The "Watermelon Slim" comes from a period when he was growing the oversized fruits, also from a tradition in early blues when some seminal performers fashioned their names after foods, most famously Blind Lemon Jefferson and Barbecue Bob Hicks. Owing no doubt to a combination of natural intelligence and deep experience, Slim has been able to forge a convincingly lived-in style that eludes many white musicians who would like to define themselves as blues artists.

I've never witnessed Slim in concert, only heard him on recordings, but the evidence of Traveling Man confirms a suspicion that he is particularly impressive in live performance. The two concerts here, taking up a disc each, were conducted in 2016 at Oklahoma City and Norman in his adopted state of Oklahoma, though he lives -- appropriately -- in Mississippi these days, close enough to the notorious highway where Robert Johnson met the devil that he'll take you there on some midnight, if you're foolhardy enough.

He's playing, solo, an electrified resonator guitar. The musical template is almost entirely Mississippi blues, both Delta and hill country. He touches on some of the downhome classics: "Two Trains Running," "John Henry," "Jimmy Bell," "61 Highway" and more. There are also impressive originals, largely autobiographical, with some calling up his onetime truck-driving profession. They sound improvised as imagined in the course of monotonous drives across the country.

Nearly everything is a distinct pleasure: the unique singing, the moody, in-the-tradition guitar, and all but one of the songs. Like "Halloween Woman," the final number on his previous release (Church of the Blues, which I reviewed here on 19 January 2019), "Dark Genius" is weirdly creepy and off-putting. Introducing it, Slim casually informs us he means to offend. I don't know why he felt that particular need (unless for purposes of outrageous humor, nowhere in evidence alas), but I'll give this to him: he succeeded. Don't let it scare you away, though. It is the last cut, after all. You can always pretend that the album concludes with "Devil's Cadillac."